Letters to the Editor
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This is summer reading?
Pardon me for suggesting that this list sounds not just pretentious but ostentatiously pretentious. I note that of the mysteries, one is purely bizarre, one has a "flimsy plot" (odd for a mystery!), one is an Elmore Leonard, and one is a spy thriller and therefore should have been included in your earlier list. I am intellectually pretentious enough to be interested in the first two myself, but I can't help but wonder if you folks actually read mysteries, since exactly one of these four (Leonard, of course) seems to be in the mainstream of mystery fiction, and he's famous from movies anyhow - and my wife is an award-winning mystery writer!
As for the science fiction, all I really need to say is that the odious neologism "sci-fi" is associated with things like 1950s giant-insect movies for real readers of "SF," but I will add that I would hardly recommend Ian McDonald or Sheri Tepper for summer reading, however talented they are (and they are). If this is your idea of summer reading, God save us from your recommendations for moral uplift and intellectual improvement!
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*shakes head*
*wanders off, unsure whether to laugh or cry*
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Real readers don't say sci-fi?
Funny how nobody ever told... everybody I know who's still calling it sci-fi. Maybe for a certain generation it does have that connotation, but I grew up with "sci-fi" and it'll always be that to me.
I don't see why summer reading has to be fluff, although I do realize that many people think this is so. I am presently re-reading Guy Gavriel Kay's "A Song for Arbonne" and am planning to pick up Tepper's The Margarets as soon as I can get to a decent bookstore. (I was hoping my library would pick it up, but they're always very slow with speculative fiction.) Yeah, there's fluff available in this area, but I don't think it's worth reading.
Summer is the time when I feel like getting absorbed and forgetting about the heat for awhile, and the good stuff can do that--the fluff can't.
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SF v Sci-Fi
Here's the deal. In the 1960's the term sci-fi was coined inside the science fiction community and specifically referred to the bad stuff, clanking robots, silly aliens, spaceships that flew like jet airplanes in space, all that kind of stuff. Science fiction readers used the abbreviation SF to refer to the books they liked and recommended to each other. Sci-fi was then picked up by mainstream publications in the 70's and used by critics, most of whom only knew science fiction from bad tv shows and movies to refer to all science fiction, whether it featured silly aliens, or, in the case of writers like Ursula LeGuin, Frederick Pohl and many others, books that actually combined literary values with thoughtful extrapolation. For the next twenty years science fiction writers explained over and over again the difference they saw in the two terms, but to no avail. (Harlan Ellison's rant on the sc-fi channel is a classic example). The rest of the world was going to call it sci-fi whether the science fiction community liked it or not.
That's why old-time SF fans hate the word sci-fi. Not only was it originally meant as a deragatory term, the rest of the world insisted on using it as the description of all science fiction. By the way, unless someone else can show me an example, it's the only time I know of a creative community not being allowed to use their own preferred way of naming their work.
Well, that's an old battle, and from the viewpoint of SF fans it was lost long ago. The topic at hand is summer reading, and I have a couple books to recommend. Kay Kenyon's "Bright of the Sky", the story of a man searching for his past and lost family in an alternate, manufactured unoverse, is a classic adventure story in the tradition of Dune and Riverworld. And if you read Minister Faust's "From The Notebooks of Dr. Brain", you'll never look at super-heroes in quite the same way again.
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The Great Debate
The whole "SF" vs. "Sci-fi" debate reminds me of a passage from Woody Allen's "My Philosophy":
We can say that the universe consists of a substance, and this substance we will call "atoms," or else we will call it "monads." Democritus called it atoms. Leibniz called it monads. Fortunately, the two men never met, or there would have been a very dull argument.
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Oh Dios Mio
Please, someone, anyone, whack any paid editor upside the head with a copy of the Chicago Manual who lets the abominable "mash-up" slip past.
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Click, click, click
Is there some practical reason why it was necessary to click multiple times to find out what the books were that were being reviewed? Most everyone with multiple reviews to offer provides a list up front so that no one needs to waste their time on stuff they don't want just because they have to go page after page after page even to find out the titles and authors to be discussed.
Similarly, was it just impossible to put each tiny review together with others so that, just as with every other article, there was a full page of content before clicking and waiting for the next page to load? The way you did this, every separate review was given its own separate page. If you're going to consolidate reviews into a single column or collection, then bloody well consolidate them.
What I wanted when I ran into this item this morning before breakfast, before work, was to know what the topic was, and that meant lots of unnecessary fiddling around because apparently it was a secret. Now that I've found out, I'm ticked off that you wasted so much of my time. Maybe every clutch of Salon reviews is the same and this only stood out because the items were often quite short. Maybe your film reviews are treated just the same and I was either too absorbed to notice or too oblivious to the format and presentation because I was too focused on paging through to get to the one in the headers that attracted my attention.
But there have to be people hungrier than me, busier than me, and I'll betcha that a handy list of what's under discussion would save a world of time for everything from your non-mainstream movie reviews to this multi-author selection of book reviews. Or would that be too much consideration to request and too practical to be provided?
Meanwhile, having used up the available time, the reviews themselves may still get read, but it won't be this morning.